


Bird People

by toodelicatee



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Eventual Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, M/M, Major Illness, Past Child Abuse, Rape, Sex, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-13 14:25:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15366615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toodelicatee/pseuds/toodelicatee
Summary: A little girl lands on the doorstep of 221b with a history that makes Sherlock and John tremor. A harrowing and thrilling journey is about to begin, and nothing will ever quite be the same again for all involved.





	1. Moonlight

**Author's Note:**

> Song for this chapter: Bird Gerhl by Anthony and the Johnsons.

The road home is long. She sleeps in doorways- eating nothing, wearing little. Wet pieces of cardboard box lying around discarded, she uses to cover her cold body. Nothing to move her forward but the moonlight. It catches on her skin as she travels, sometimes bathing her in slants of pleasant pastel light. Other times drowning her in its milky glow until she feels uncomfortable. Watched by the heavens, forcing her to hide again in another doorway.

This is how it goes. Two days, nearly stretching out into three.

People stop her on the way. Caring men and women, probably parents themselves and worried at the sight of a shivering dishevelled child, scuttling around on her own. She shakes her head when they offer help.

I know where I'm going. I know where I need to be.

Her cuts- yes, some have faded, but many are fresh, _there are always fresh ones_ \- sting with the rainwater. Dirty rainwater, running over her skin as she huddles in alleyways attempting to find sleep.

Sleep barely comes. An hour or two every day- at most.

When she arrives on the doorstep, she can just about read the sign. 221b. She has the right place. This is it. Her small hand raps on the wood and her other leans against it, barely able to stand upright.

There's no more moonlight. Pale orb, shrunk behind some cloud.

An old woman answers and immediately beckons her inside without so much as a question, _let's get you out of the rain, dear._

There are two men at the top of the stairs who don't notice her. She catches sight of them for a moment before they disappear into a room. One of them is short and fair-haired and the other is her father.


	2. Hurricane Thunderclaps (Part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song for this chapter: Kettering by The Antlers
> 
> (I'm inspired by Cormac McCarthy's writing style, so I don't do speech marks or a conventional prose structure. I like fragmentation and minimalism while still aiming for the poetic.  
> Please let me know what you think in the comments. I'm more inspired to update if I have feedback to motivate me.)

The rain outside- slick black. Why does it always come down to the falling of the rain? Nothing to do with anything. Not the sombre mood, the blue music from the television, the smell of smoke and nature on her clothes. Sherlock wonders why it is always the rain he chooses to focus on, when there is something far more important placed right in front of him. Like now: the ragged eyes of a child too tired to even stand up. He won’t look.

She leans back against the sofa. Her hands itching, fiddling with the loose skin on the tips of her fingers. She shies when John asks her questions.

What’s your name?

 _Madeline_.

How long have you been travelling for? You look so cold.  
  
(By this point Mrs Hudson has given the child a blanket to wear around her shivering, waif-like form.)

_Two nights, Sir._

Why are you on your own, sweetheart?

_I ran away, Sir._

You don’t need to be afraid, I’m just asking so I can help you. I’m not going to hurt you or anything.

She nods politely and John smiles, but when he asks the next question, she still looks afraid of him.

Why did you run away; are you comfortable telling us that? And what made you come here, dear?

She opens her mouth to begin answering. Her tiny mouth. Plump pink lips all cracked and bloody, Neat white teeth- an endearing gap in between the front two. Before she can even form the first word, her eyes crinkle. She stammers. Her chin does that thing. Sherlock notices and inhales- he’s paying attention now. That thing that happens to children’s chins when they’re about to cry, a small tremble.

Sherlock exhales.

Enough of the questions, John, you’re startling my daughter.

-

There he was, well over a decade ago. Or a decade exactly. He can’t remember so well. It was a difficult time, knee deep in an addiction near-impossible to kick. Knee deep in syringes some nights. Knee deep in his own vomit on others.

The voicemail light blinking at him from the coffee table. He ignored it for a good long while until her voice filled the air. Often a pleasant sound, her tone was now sombre and it made him feel more nauseous than he already was.

Sherlock. Sherlock.

Frantic tones. His Louisa was never frantic. He was so out of it, so drugged up it took him a few seconds to remember her big, round belly. The baby inside it. His baby. Was this the reason for her upset?

He pushed himself up off the floor and grabbed the phone, balancing it on his shoulder. The rain outside coated the windows in a light film. _There’s blood everywhere, Sherlock._ The rain outside slightly heavier, fatter droplets, no longer silent splashing and crashing against the glass. _I’m at the hospital. I’m scared, I’m scared, she isn’t kicking anymore; I can’t feel her inside._ If you closed your eyes, Sherlock concentrated, you could confuse the sound of rain with the sound of waves, which, if you blinked then closed your eyes again, a second time, you could confuse even further- with the sound of a sobbing woman’ s voice.

He told Louisa just that. She shouted at him. _Sherlock, please. Listen. Focus._

He listened. Patiently. As she told him that they were performing an operation. _The only thing that can save our baby._

He nodded into the phone, then realised the futility of that. He spoke instead. Three words coming out distant and detached- _I’ll come along_ \- his mind a slave to the chorus of the cloud’s tears. No time for his lover or their unborn child, no, the clouds were calling him.

Come to the hospital, please, I need you Sherlock.

It wasn’t that the rain held a power over man- to entrance him, to nourish him, to water crops and threaten flood and destruction. It was less simple. Rain and man were at war with each other for the power over music. The power to create the best music. In this metaphor, rain meaning something else, something Sherlock never dared to say aloud even in his strongest drug-induced stupors.

Something that was God.

Sherlock whispered into the phone, _I don’t know what to do._

Rain was winning. He dropped to his knees and wept.

-

John listens to the meagre bits of detail Sherlock gives about his child. How she was conceived. John’s curious about which woman Sherlock would sleep with. He had thought the detective a virgin.

Really John, does it matter?  
  
Of course it bloody well matters, Sherlock. You’re a Father to an eleven year old girl and you never told me. I never even knew you’d had-

What?

I just, I never knew you’d had a girlfriend before.

It wasn’t like that.

So what was it like?

It doesn’t matter, now, does it? Louisa’s dead.

The child had struggled to let that detail out _. Where’s your Mother?_ Sherlock had asked without compassion. Plain and cold and blunt. She hid her face. Few tears threatening to spill. _Dead_ , she’d whispered _, she got cancer when I was six_. And John was surprised at how Sherlock had rolled his head back, even though only a fraction of an inch, his mouth forming a straight line that- if he had been alone- might have formed into a very contemplative, morose frown. Was this what it looked like, to see Sherlock Holmes grieve? To see his heart break, even if only slightly, on the spot?

Madeline is washing herself up. Mrs Hudson drew her a bath without hesitation as soon as the poor child had turned up on the doorstep. John gave her one of his sweaters to wear once she was all warm and dry.

Sherlock paces.

When did you leave them?

Who?

John dares to ask. Your family? You must have walked out at some point.

Can you stop with all these invasive questions, for God’s sake?

I’m just interested.

You’re being ridiculous.

I just didn’t imagine you were the type to walk out on a woman and leave her to raise your child on her own. I know you play heartless, but, I didn’t expect that.

It wasn’t that simple. Sherlock hisses venom. He casts John a glance that says do not push me.

But John is not Sherlock’s closest friend because he knows when to stop pushing. He is Sherlock’s closest friend because he knows when to _not_ stop pushing.

Why, Sherlock? Why did you do it then?

He doesn’t give all the details, only scraps of it.

Madeline had been born through an emergency caesarean, Sherlock explains too casually for him not to be contriving calmness. She was very premature. Unbelievably tiny. They weren’t allowed to hold her until a week later and even then, she was still breathing via machines.

Louisa and Sherlock with her in the hospital for ages. Watching her little chest fall and rise.

She was diagnosed with leukaemia, never having even been home yet. More doctors, more medicine, more pain. Sherlock took comfort not in the arms of his girlfriend but the arms of heroin. When he was at the hospital one night, particularly high, some trouble happened. Social services. Investigation. Bad result. Sherlock broke into his child’s room when he wasn’t allowed to visit anymore. Further trouble. Social services yet again. Investigation yet again. The result this time: permanent. No more Daddy Sherlock. He was not allowed to see his child. Louisa left him. He didn’t blame her, he told her to leave, so she would still be allowed to raise their daughter.

He heard a good six months later that the baby had recovered completely from the leukemia. Was back home with her Mother. They were well and they were happy and he never heard anything about them again.

Until eleven years later. Right now. Madeline in 221B, soaked and thin and terrorised to the core. What had happened? Sherlock had no clue. He tells John- _I’ve tried to deduce, but… something’s stopping me. It’s not like it normally is, I can’t seem to…_

 _Maybe_ , John ventures, _you’re preventing yourself from deducing. You don’t really want to find out the truth. All those bruises, cuts. You’re scared to find out what she’s been through_.

  _I just-_ he strains his features. Today is weighing heavy. He looks out at the rain. Change of subject. _I just don’t really see why you need to know all of this, John. It’s the past. It’s irrelevant._

John nods. He could see that now was the time to stop pushing. Yes he pushed the tide out far, frequently too far, but the doctor always knew when it was too _too_ far and that was when he conceded.

A gentle hand on Sherlock’s back.

It’ll all be fine, mate.

John’s gentle hand, still there.

They both knew, they couldn’t quite explain how, but they both knew, almost certainly, that for some inexplicable reason- nothing would be fine again.

Perhaps nothing ever had been in the first place. A perpetual cycle of doom and dark skies and not fine not fine not fine not fine help I don’t know what to do / There is only myself and the rain.

-

 

 

 

 


End file.
